Why Are There Fewer Serial Killers Today? What Changed
Serial killers are far rarer than in the 1980s. We test what Bundy, Ridgway and BTK each relied on, what ended it, and why the counts disagree so widely.
Serial killers are far rarer in the United States than they were in the 1980s, and the likeliest reason is that the things they relied on mostly stopped existing. Phones, cameras, DNA databases and national case-linking made it harder to kill repeatedly without being identified, while fewer people hitchhiked and fewer children roamed unsupervised. No study consulted for this article apportions the decline among those factors, and the size of the drop depends on which count is used.
Most explanations arrive as a list. We can test them differently, the way a detective would: take a killer, ask what he counted on, and check whether that condition still exists.
How large is the decline, and why do the numbers disagree?
Most figures in circulation come from the Radford/FGCU Serial Killer Database, which counts only killers who have been caught and identified. Its tables measure different things, and headlines tend to blend them. One table counts killers by the decade in which they began killing. The September 2016 edition shows 768 for the 1980s and 117 for the 2010s, but that last row covered only about six and a half years of its decade, so it could never match a full one.
A second table counts killers operating in a given year. For 1987, the peak, the database showed 189 killers with two or more victims in 2016, 198 in the figures the ABA Journal reported in December 2020, and 212 in the 2023 report. The peak has risen with each edition, presumably as killers identified later were added to it. The same ABA Journal summary gave 43 active killers for 2015 and two for 2019, or 26 and two if a serial killer must have three victims. The recent numbers say more about how many killers had been identified by then than about how many were killing.
A third series, from criminologist James Alan Fox and his co-authors, appears in a chart in Northeastern's 2023 write-up: 259 killers for the 1980s by decade of first killing, and 42 for the 2010s. The write-up does not say what filter makes that series so much smaller than the Radford table's 768 for the same decade. What the series share is direction: each one falls steeply after the 1980s. For scale, the FBI estimates that serial murder accounts for fewer than one in a hundred homicides.
What did each killer rely on?
Ted Bundy was not outsmarted. On February 15, 1978, a Pensacola patrolman named David Lee ran the plates on an orange Volkswagen in the early hours of the morning and found it had been reported stolen. Bundy had killed in several states by then, and what he relied on was a country where agencies had no automatic way to compare notes. The FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, built to link crimes across jurisdictions, did not go live until 1985, and the idea behind it came from a Los Angeles homicide detective, Pierce Brooks.
Gary Ridgway relied on something else: time. Investigators interviewed him in 1984, and in 1987 a court ordered him to chew a piece of gauze for a saliva sample. The sample could not yet be matched to anything. In 2001, newer DNA testing tied it to DNA found on three victims, and he was arrested on November 30 of that year. He pleaded guilty to 48 murders in 2003 and said he had picked sex workers because he believed he could kill many of them without being caught. He had counted on evidence that could not yet be read. That condition has no equivalent now, because a sample that means nothing today can be tested again years later.
Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, relied on a telephone line. He installed alarm systems for ADT in Wichita starting in 1974, and in at least two of his early attacks he cut the phone line before going inside. One woman later recalled that when she asked him about an alarm for her home, he said BTK usually cut the phone lines first. He was identified in 2005 not by any alarm but by a floppy disk he mailed to a television station, whose deleted-file data named Christ Lutheran Church and a user called Dennis.
The same test applies to victims. Fox has put it plainly: "People don't hitchhike anymore." People also carry phones that can reach help, and cameras cover far more streets than they once did. Michael Aamodt of Radford, who compiled the database's figures, has pointed out that children are rarely out unsupervised the way they were in the 1970s, and that many victims typical of that era are now almost impossible to find. Fox gives weight to prisons as well. Between 1980 and 1992 the federal and state incarceration rate more than doubled, to 332 per 100,000 residents, so some would-be killers were probably locked up for other crimes before a series could begin. These are changes in conditions, not in character, which is why they can be checked case by case. Fox and Aamodt are quoted at length in Discover's account of the decline.
The objection: maybe they are just harder to count
The strongest challenge is arithmetic. FBI data compiled by the Murder Accountability Project put the share of murders cleared at about 72 percent in 1980 and about 58 percent in 2023. A serial killer is, by definition, someone to whom several murders have been attributed, so fewer solved cases could mean fewer recognized series without any drop in the behavior. Thomas Hargrove, who founded that project, has estimated that as many as 2,000 serial killers active since 1976 could still be at large.
That possibility cannot be ruled out, and it may make the true decline somewhat smaller than the tables show. But the same logic applied to the 1970s points the other way. A series was recognized then only when someone solved one of its cases, or when a detective happened to compare files from two counties. Today, DNA profiles from two crime scenes can match each other with no name attached to either, which the FBI's CODIS database records as a forensic hit. A series can now be recognized before the killer is. If the hidden population of the 1980s still existed, we would expect linked but unsolved series to pile up. Testing that would take a count of them, and the Radford data cannot supply one, since it includes only killers who have been identified. The argument is an inference, not a measurement, and it does not settle the question.
Why the old picture survives
The popular picture is of killers everywhere and brilliant. Streaming and podcasts keep it alive, and Fox has a name for the cases they revisit: legacy killers, men active decades ago whose stories still dominate. The cases above point the other way. A patrolman on the overnight shift, a laboratory technique that arrived years late, a floppy disk. The decline itself happened gradually over thirty years with no single moment to announce it, and a crime that fades without an event rarely earns a headline.
One article can only sample this. In our book Why Serial Killers Disappeared, we ask the same question case by case, mechanism by mechanism: what each killer relied on, and whether it still exists. That includes Bundy's name sitting on a King County list of roughly 3,500 suspects, and the month it took a detective to surface it, and an Idaho investigation that put a name on a quadruple homicide in six weeks. The book runs 22 chapters and 110 pages, in EPUB and PDF.
